Laser-Cut Laser Cutter (v3)

Just a quick update: The gantry is almost fully-enclosed with 0.125" laser-cut plywood. This video shows off some of the finer details in action.

At this point, I'd almost call it done, except my laser diode has stopped cutting through as consistently as it did on its first cut and it's now struggling to cut through cereal boxes unless I bring the feed down to a sluggish ~10mm-per-minute. I suspect dust on the lense is to blame, and I'll need to add ventilation shortly. I may also need to adjust the focus of the laser as the first cuts were done on a piece of cardboard that was curved upwards about 0.125" closer to the laser diode than the cuts shown here.

and, of course, the video (shot by low-res phone camera):

Most of the components have been assembled--woot!

(With 445nm, OD6+ glasses ON) I made my first cut cleanly through cereal box cardboard. I'm currently converting Inkscape SVG vector graphics with Groover's laserengraver extension. (This cut's feed was 200mm/min, although, the head never ramped up to that top speed since most of the cut paths were too short.)

The gantry section is complete, and so far: no fancy machine shop tools were needed in the assembly.

To Tension the belts, the center plate joins the belt ends together with a delrin sandwich: two plates, one flat, one grated. The grating does the heavy lifting of holding the belt in place while the screws prevent it from slipping. I've seen a few different ways to tie down belt-ends, some often cleverly wrapping the belt back on itself. In this case, though, I've tried to keep it simple and fairly easy to duplicate.

A lot of progress has been happening in the background with this project, but it's almost in a respectable state at this point. Here's a quick hand-test of the bearings running on their acetal fixtures.